Amir Taaki is one of Forbes’s future billionaires and a London squat resident. His domain? The shadowy world of digital currency Bitcoin...

Wednesday 29 January 2014 12:14 BST

"My mum liked it,” says Amir Taaki — the 25-year-old master coder and visionary of online currency Bitcoin — of his unexpected inclusion in Forbes magazine’s annual list of the most influential young people in technology. “Because my mum for years has not understood what I’m about. She’s like ‘Why have you quit university, you need to get a job, ah you’re just a layabout’. But now she’s like ‘My son’s in Forbes’.”

Most of those chosen by the magazine are the founders of the world’s leading young start-ups. Like Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore, 27, the Aberdeenshire web whizz thought to be worth more than £50 million, and multi-millionaire Snapchat founders Evan Spiegel, 23, and Bobby Murphy, 25, who turned down a $3 billion acquisition from Facebook. They live a jet-set lifestyle: Cashmore, for example, divides his time between LA, San Francisco, Scotland and New York.

When I arrange to meet Taaki — one of the few British names on the Forbes list — he directs me to a drab road in Hackney Wick, which I assume must be the location for a trendy east London co-working space. When I arrive, the address is a building site. After a minute, the steel workshop door opens vertically in a clatter of noise and Taaki emerges in dirty tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie and welcomes me into what is, very clearly, a squat.

In a cavernous downstairs room a pretty hippy girl is cooking an omelette, mince and sausages on a few ancient hobs, and a few older-looking blokes are watching bowls on a tiny TV with one of those retro triangular aerials on top, antennae akimbo. Upstairs in the living room, in almost total darkness, Taaki explains he’s staying in this squat temporarily while he meets people — including the Wiki-Leaks gang — in London, and soon hopes to return to Calafou, an anarchist community near Barcelona.

Taaki is widely considered to be one of the most talented hackers in Europe. (“Hacker” may make him sound like a nerdy web bandit but in programming circles it just refers to the creative types who can break down software code and rewrite it.) He is known for his leading role in Bitcoin — the online currency based in code that allows web users to buy products and services from each other, and can now be used — via a software “wallet” application on your phone — to buy a pint in certain trendy east London drinking holes.

The London-born son of an Iranian property developer dad and a Scottish-English mum, Taaki, who was expelled from his grammar for hacking the school network and dropped out of university three times before emerging as a self-taught star of open-source programming, is among those who people the web’s darker corners.

The astonishing rise of Bitcoin (the niche plaything of hacker types this time last year), which is now discussed by policymakers at Davos and sees its exchange rate tracked by financial reporters, has brought Taaki into the limelight. Taaki’s fingerprints are all over Bitcoin — he’s coded much of the infrastructure that runs it and founded two of the sites used to trade it (Britcoin, later Intersango) and spend it (Dark Wallet).

To London’s expanding community of Bitcoin speculators, entrepreneurs and adherents, Taaki is seen as a boy genius, a sometimes controversial puller of strings. One Bitcoin owner at a Spitalfields meet-up a few days earlier whispers conspiratorially that Taaki might be Satoshi Nakamoto — the online name for the mysterious person or group who founded Bitcoin in 2009.

Perched on the next sofa and by now barely visible in the atmospheric gloom, Taaki initially says that “no one knows who he [Nakamoto] is”, before admitting a bit more acquaintance than that. “We’re very different,” he says, “but also very similar in other ways … For him it was not about profit — a lot of the Bitcoins credited to Satoshi, they have not been spent. And there’s a lot of speculation that probably he just burned all the Bitcoins, so they’re gone for ever.”

There are about 12 million Bitcoins in circulation, and their dramatic price rises and collapses have made both “Bitcoin millionaires” and given credence to the view — most recently voiced by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller at Davos last week — that the project is a speculation bubble rather than a true currency. Worth less than a dollar in 2011, the price rose — through various ups and downs — to as much as $1,100 last year as more companies and non-profit groups began to accept Bitcoins. At the Spitalfields meet-up I attended earlier this month, Bitcoins were changing hands (or rather mobile wallets) between speculators for just over £500. When key US Bitcoiner Charlie Shrem — whose Bitcoin exchange company BitInstant has links to the Winklevoss twins — was arrested and charged with money-laundering on Monday night, sending a panic through the community, the price fell about six per cent within hours.

Taaki got into Bitcoin in the summer of 2010, and owned $600 worth when the exchange rate was 10 cents each (so 6,000 Bitcoins). Expecting a big crash, he sold them for a $100 profit soon after but had he held onto to them through the stratospheric rises, his original stash would now be worth just under $6 million. He still owns some coins he has earned from programming work and his various Bitcoin companies, but our surroundings are a major hint that he isn’t in it for the money. As is the fact that he’s said to have turned down lucrative job offers from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.

“There’s a lot more value in the things that we’re doing than just a few pennies, a few millions,” he says. “It’s a lot deeper, the projects that we’re dealing with. Yeah, I could have a lot of money if I choose to work for a corporation. My friends are always saying to me ‘Amir, why don’t you work for a few years in a corporation and then fund the projects you wanna do?’ but it doesn’t work like that. I wouldn’t be here doing the things with Dark Wallet and so on if I wasn’t focused.”

Dark Wallet is Taaki’s latest project — a crowd-funded program that allows people to store and use their Bitcoins without a trace. That’s important because in a free society “we need to be able to trade anonymously,” he says. “For instance, buying drugs online, that’s something people need to do.” He says he doesn’t take drugs himself but wants to create marketplaces — such as the recently disbanded website Silk Road, an amazing bazaar of drugs, guns and other toys — which cut out the middlemen and allow people to buy freely and safely directly from other users.

Taaki says Bitcoin is exciting because it promises to return us our “sovereignty” — our freedom to spend money on whatever will improve our lives away from the prying eyes of corporations and the state. “Not dogmatic” is how he sums up his political position, continuing: “I’m for localisation, having your sovereignty, having your autonomy, people being responsible. All these ideologies are obsolete, we’re in a new time,” he says.

His vision is idealistic rather than destructive. “We can live much better, we can spend way less, we spend more time with our kids,” he says, denouncing the talented programmers who take jobs at Silicon Roundabout “spending six months to make cat ears tilt when they tilt their head”.

So how did he feel about being included in a list of the new masters of the capitalist universe? “Er, I don’t know,” he answers. “A lot of people appreciate my work and the projects I’m doing. And so a lot of people are recognising, and that’s how I derive the pleasure. It’s nice. The awards and the honours and things — it doesn’t mean too much.”

BITCOIN FOR BEGINNERS

Bitcoin is an online currency where each “coin” is a piece of unique code stored on a computer. The Bitcoins can be used to buy products and services from sites (and now some shops and pubs in London and elsewhere) who accept the currency. Its acceptance by popular black market site Silk Road — shut down by the FBI last year — was crucial to its early popularity.

It was created by pseudonymous programmer Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, whose true identity has never been confirmed.

Bitcoin is “peer-to-peer” and is not regulated by a central bank — which makes it attractive to web users who want their transactions to be anonymous. But this also contributes to the currency’s highly volatile price. The coins can be bought from those who already own them or “mined” by powerful computers.

Worth less than a dollar in 2011, the value of a Bitcoin rose to $266 after the 2012-2013 Cypriot financial crisis, before crashing to $50. By the end of November the world’s Bitcoins were worth a combined $10 billion.

Yesterday the currency took a major step towards acceptance by mainstream finance when Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of the New York Finance Department, proposed drawing up a “Bitcoin licence” to regulate its use. “We want to make certain New York remains a hub for innovation and a magnet for new technology firms,” said Lawsky.

Some in the movement — like Taaki —are concerned that the new interest in Bitcoin from banks and regulators could tame the currency too much. “It could just end up as more of the same, if we’re not careful and we’re not vigilant,” Taaki told the Standard.